Contact
by Platitude
Summary: A world on the brink of a new era. Signs from beyond. A prisoner, and an entity beyond comprehension...


Contact

A world on the brink of a new era. Signs from beyond. A prisoner, and an entity beyond comprehension...

Hello, and welcome to my new story, Contact! To be completely honest, I did not intend to put this story in this fandom, but eventually decided to change some of the aspects of this tale to make it fit into the clothing of a Bioshock Fanfiction. Although most will probably find it somewhat enigmatic, I really hope that all of my readers will enjoy this work.

She awoke to the sound of voices, babbling about vital signs and barrel angle, to an inky blackness deeper than sleep. Blinking, she attempted to stand, only to meet resistance, as if she were bound. Then, she remembered.

…_ Velocity projections stable, air pressure in acceptable parameters_...

The voices, those same buzzing, static-filled ones which had roused her moments ago, spoke again. At first, she had hated them. Their discussions of unknowable machinations either in the flesh or through the crackling filter of Tesla waves had been omnipresent for so long. They were there through the countless operations, the hours spent crouched in the corner of her tiny cell, and now they were there with her in a metal capsule, poised to be fired into the unknown… Yet still, the anger was gone, now but an empty void. There was nothing in her future, and what was in her past no longer mattered.

…_ Launch to begin in ten seconds… Nine seconds… _

Once again, the chatter of voices snapped her back to the present.

_… Eight seconds… Seven seconds… Closing air vents… Six seconds…_

The woman tensed slightly, once again shutting her eyes. It would end soon, there was no way this insane experiment could ever work…

_… Five seconds… Beginning cockpit pressurization… Four seconds… _

A hissing noise partially obscured the countdown, but the mounting excitement of the voices was almost palpable.

… _Three seconds… Two seconds… Ignition process beginning… One second!_

The voices fell silent, and for a moment, the woman could hear nothing but the rhythmic beating of her own heart. Then, with a roar like that of a thousand lions, the solid fuel canisters exploded behind her.

The capsule began accelerating, its speed increasing at a terrific rate. She could see sunlight through the veil of her eyelids now, and opened them just in time to see herself pass through the cloud layer.

_Ten-thousand meters!_

The voices returned, barely audible over the deafening noise of wind rushing over the capsule's metal exterior, shaking the cockpit violently as it ascended towards the heavens…

_Twenty-thousand meters! Farthest extent of troposphere reached! Subject's vital signs within functioning levels!_

The almost instantaneous decrease of pressure began to take its toll, and the woman could feel rivulets of blood beginning to trickle down her face.

_Thirty-thousand meters! Forty-thousand meters! Hull temperature stable! Cockpit oxygen levels stable! Fifty-thousand meters! The capsule is leaving the stratosphere!_

The voices were screaming by now, and the woman squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her mind slowly going blank as blood was forced out of her head by gravity, depriving it of oxygen. It would surely end any moment now, an explosion or structural failure must have been imminent… What had the voices said? _Subject three-hundred thirty-seven. _Three-hundred thirty-six attempts before her own. Three-hundred thirty-six failures. Three-hundred thirty-six deaths. She was but a number, a statistic to be debated and experimented with. Just like the other three-hundred thirty-six.

_Ninety-thousand meters! One-hundred thousand meters! Thermosphere has been penetrated!_

She remembered herself when she was young, living in Strasbourg, lying on the banks of the Rhine, looking up at the stars.

_To go into space._

A childlike wonderment overtook her then, a dream deferred, rising once again to the surface. Gone were the voices, the pain, the noise, and all that was left was the shadowy beyond above her, and the fragile and beautifully blue, white, and green form of Earth slowly rotating below her. The world began to shrink behind her now, all but an insignificant speck of dust, a grain of sand just like the countless other pinpoints of light, thousands and thousands of stars and planets and things beyond one's imagination. In that time, it was as if the whole of the infinitely vast and unknowable universe was spread out before the woman, almost close enough to touch, and yet so very far away. She was alive, for the first time, in every sense of the word.

The moon had come into view now, a grey, lifeless sphere pitted and marked with thousands of craters. It was disinteresting to the woman at first, a dead zone in a world of life, but upon closer inspection…

There was something behind the satellite, mostly obscured by the moon's shadow, but with just enough visible to get her attention. As she drifted closer, the form of this… thing became clearer. It looked like an arm, long and spindly, like that of a spider, but of some mysterious substance, a crystal of sorts. The woman blinked once, and it disappeared. As did the moon. Her vision seemed to become twisted, distorted, and the light of the stars seemed to blend together, whiting out the blackness of space…

_A tear._

Beyond the moon's orbit, somewhere between Earth and Mars-

They were there, fully visible now, in their thousands. Like giant snowflakes, they floated there in space, motionless. Sunlight and starlight danced off their faceted forms in a dazzling display of color-

What were they? Aliens-

Living-

Dead-

Nature-

Technology-

She was approaching a red planet now, Mars-

The crystalline entities were clustered around the globe-

It was being destroyed-

Also rebuilt-

One of the beings came towards the woman and her capsule, at a fantastic speed. It was the size of a small world.

_You have come._

A voice once again appeared within her head, but it was different. It was not human, but spoke as though it were. A voice unlike any the woman had ever heard, it was equal parts foreign and familiar, jarring and melodious.

The next thing she knew, she was someplace else. No longer in the capsule, the woman found herself standing, naked, on the sands of Mars. She could breathe. In the distance, giant forms, equal parts living and technology, were rebuilding the shattered Martian landscape, transforming the desolate world into a strange and beautiful and alien thing.

Behind her came a bright flash, and a crystalline monolith appeared. It hovered in the air.

"I… We…" The woman said, and swallowed. "We come in peace." There was a long pause, and finally the being spoke.

_So do we._

Well, I hope that this was to your liking. If not, please write a complaint in a review, expressing as much hatred as you desire. Actually, even if you did like this, a review wouldn't hurt anyway.


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